Miguel Aguilera   complex systems, neuroscience and cognition

Integrated information in the thermodynamic limit

Together with Ezequiel Di Paolo, we have just published a new paper in which we explore how integrated information scales in very large systems. The capacity to integrate information is crucial for biological, neural and cognitive processes and it is regarded by Integrated Information Theory (IIT) proponents as a measure of conscious activity. In this paper we compute (analytically and numerically) the value of IIT measures ($\Phi$) for a family of Ising models of infinite size. This is ex...  Read more 20 Mar 2019 - 2 minute read

Adaptation to criticality through organizational invariance in embodied agents

I just published with Manuel Bedia a paper in Scientific Reports that results from an exploration of how tools from statistical mechanics could be used to model adaptive mechanisms. In this paper, we explore how adaptation to criticality could be used as a general adaptive mechanism in robots controlled by a neural network, using a simple mechanism that preserves a specific structure of correlations. This has in...  Read more 21 May 2018 - 1 minute read

Rhythms of the Collective Brain: Metastable Synchronization and Cross-Scale Interactions in Connected Multitudes

I have recently published a new paper where we model social coordination in self-organized crowds social media, using data from the 15M movement in Spain:

Abstract<...  Read more 20 Mar 2018 - 1 minute read

Postdoc at the IAS Research Centre for Life, Mind and Society

I recently started at a new postdoc position in the IAS Research Centre for Life, Mind and Society at the University of the Basque Country, funded by a postdoc grant from this university.

I will be working with Ezequiel Di Paolo in my postdoc project ‘Information Theory and Maximum Entropy Modelling in Emb...  Read more 02 Mar 2018 - less than 1 minute read

Extended Neural Metastability in an Embodied Model of Sensorimotor Coupling

This paper is an extension of some of the results worked during my PhD thesis. We investigate how the source of metastability in cognitive activity is not necessarily restricted to the action of neural circuits alone, but in some circumstances it can be generated from the sensorimotor coupling between an agent’s brain and its environment.

Aguilera M, Bedia MG and Barandiaran XE (2016) Extended Neural Meta...  Read more 09 Oct 2016 - 1 minute read

PhD thesis defence – Interaction Dynamics and Autonomy in Cognitive Systems

Last week I defended my PhD dissertation entitled ‘Interaction Dynamics and Autonomy in Cognitive Systems’. It was a beautiful and intense experience for closing four years of work. The thesis was examined by Ricard Solé, Ezequiel di Paolo and Seth Bullock, which provided several points of discussion for a rich and stimulating debate about the contributions of the dissertation and lines of further development.

I should thank Manuel Bedia, Xabier Barandiaran and Francisco Serón for ...  Read more 01 Dec 2015 - less than 1 minute read